Fiction Chronicle

Mystery flitters throughout Callahan’s intermittently affecting first novel, ­otherwise populated with pedestrian motifs — the smoky interiors of dive bars, the rumble of Long Island commuter trains, the precarious interactions of seasonally induced family gatherings. The sudden death of the younger brother of 27-year-old April Simone returns Oliver Night, a childhood friend, to her life. April and Oliver are inexplicably, though undeniably, tethered. “As children, hide-and-seek was pointless,” Callahan writes. “He and April always knew where the other would be.” But they find themselves now on wildly divergent trajectories. When April isn’t tending bar, she engages in loveless sex with an abusive boyfriend and reads Flannery O’Connor to efface the coarse reality of her throwaway life. Oliver, a former Eagle Scout, attends law school and plans his wedding to an irreproachable special-education aide. Callahan alternates scenes of April and Oliver chastening each other for missed opportunities — April neglects to better her life, even though she understands its shortcomings; Oliver abandoned a promising career as a pianist for the safety of the legal profession — with depictions of the pair’s more tranquil youth. The novel wrestles with issues of loss and regret, but Callahan tends not to trust her reader, delivering themes via heavy-handed metaphors, set forth like graduate school writing exercises. It’s hard to treat seriously the question of how unearthly forces might affect relationships when an impromptu trip to the pound solves so many of April’s problems.

When Gaz was seeking a new subject for his art after an intense series of drawings and sculptures devoted to the World Trade Center and 9/11, he turned to an early love, geology. His eerie, otherworldly black-and-white aerial photographs show the violent transformations wrought on the earths surface by collisions with projectiles from outer space. Above, the Barringer Crater in Arizona.

ALL THE LIVINGBy C. E. Morgan.Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.

Set on a Kentucky tobacco farm in the 1980s, Morgan’s novel is a whisper of a book, with a striking allegorical agelessness — the scant cultural signposts include a “Where’s the Beef?” poster — and themes of death and mourning skillfully made to chafe those of young love and yearnings for exploration. Aloma Earle, who “didn’t know anything about anything,” quits her job playing piano for a mission school to live on the farm of her lover, Orren Fenton, whose family has just been killed in a car accident. With a backdrop of Spar Mountain and Slaughter Creek, Aloma feels choked by the landscape — “where every last thing wasted flesh into bone” — and as the grieving Orren withdraws, she seeks solace in a local church with the amenities of a working piano and an affable preacher. While the author revels in an often remarkable baroque style, her literary affectations can wear thin, especially in her refusal to offset dialogue with quotation marks. And her experiments with diction also sometimes backfire — as in Orren’s face “unbrooding itself” or Aloma’s self-enforced “retributive punishment.” Morgan’s success, though, comes in her articulations of backwoods Southern speech and in her patient tightening of the story’s tension. Come September, after the grind of the harvest, Aloma, resolute if not overwhelmed in her love of Orren, reprimands herself “for thinking that the easy thing was the one worth wanting.”

THE WISH MAKERBy Ali Sethi.Riverhead, $25.95.

With this first-rate novel, Sethi joins an ever-expanding roster of gifted young Pakistani writers who, after graduating from Western universities, have returned home with an urgent need to explain their misunderstood country to a global audience. Through three generations of a Lahore family, Sethi charts the tumults within Pakistani political and social life since partition in 1947, including the regular vacillations between military rule and feeble attempts at democracy. Though distinctly restrained, Sethi’s prose evokes the comic mislocutions of Jonathan Safran Foer and the vertiginous mania of Zadie Smith. But he is often less interested in providing a social critique than in interpreting juvenescence, which seems no different on the Indian sub­continent than it is here. Zaki Shirazi, the book’s narrator, grows up in a household of women — his conservative, disenfranchised grandmother; a headstrong mother who advocates sweeping societal change through the magazine she edits; and his teenage cousin, who fasts only for the purest reason: to get the boy. Zaki pre­sents these characters’ engaging histories, along with his own youthful searches for acceptance, the undulations in their lives echoing those in Pakistani society. By juxtaposing references to American pop culture (“The Wonder Years,” Mariah Carey) with, say, the machinations of arranged marriages, Sethi exposes the essential friction of life in modern Pakistan. Even local karaoke bars reflect the country’s uncomfortable middle ground, offering songs “too new for nostalgia and not new enough to stir up the excitements of the present.”

YOU OR SOMEONE LIKE YOUBy Chandler Burr.Ecco/HarperCollins, $25.99.

This novel of ideas, wrapped in a glittering package of film and literary name-dropping, traces the ascent and precipitate decline of Anne Rosenbaum, whose husband, Howard, is a Hollywood executive with top-tier media connections. Anne, long overshadowed by her accomplished spouse, is recruited to run a book club whose membership quickly gains star power through the likes of J. J. Abrams and Noah Baumbach. Howard, meanwhile, endures a crisis of faith: has he betrayed his heritage for his love of Anne, a thoroughly un-Jewish Briton? Initially, Anne uses the book group as a forum to present morality tales drawn from her own life, but when Howard rejects her for Orthodox Judaism, her lectures become fierce debates that pit faith against reason. Burr, the perfume critic for The New York Times, gives a great deal of thought to problems of race, class and religion, but it’s difficult to feel engaged in any of it since Anne, meant to be the novel’s formidable intellectual core, exudes both self-importance and self-­satisfaction. Much of the highbrow material has been cribbed from old New Yorker articles, the writers of which appear as characters in the novel; in fact, some of their dialogue arrives as direct quotations from their work — making them sound like erudite robots. Would Alex Ross, even though he once wrote this line, observe in conversation that the Salzburg Festival is “the musical version of Cannes, a glamorous watering hole for classical superstars and tycoon sophisticates and tourists sharing in their aura”?

Mike Peed is on the editorial staff of The New Yorker.

A version of this review appears in print on , on Page BR18 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Fiction Chronicle. Today's Paper|Subscribe